Israel

Middle Eastern Realities

‘Is it Fair to Say Islam is Setting the Rules?’

Andrew Bostom

Lars Vilks, Lars Hedegaard, and Rabbi Jon Hausman were interviewed yesterday (Monday, 10/5/2010) by Helen Glover of WHJJ 920 AM, Providence, about the sorry state of free speech in the West as we capitulate to Islamic intimidation over the Medieval dictates of Sharia-based “blasphemy” law.

Rabbi Hausman’s matter-of-fact description of the security measures that Mr. Vilk’s brief visit to the Boston area entailed, are particularly chilling.

Lars Vilks is the Swedish artist whose Muhammad sketch triggered both Al-Qaeda death fatwas and a thwarted assassination plan by American convert to Islam, “Jihad Jane”. Lars Hedegaard is a Danish journalist and writer who founded the Danish Free Press Society.

While “outrage” has been pretty much the key word this summer, my own reached its upper limits with the news that cartoonist Molly Norris had been forced into hiding by a fatwa threatening her life for an idea: to establish “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day,” on which the world would sketch images of the Prophet Mohammed in defiance of efforts by Muslims to censor such images, and, in some cases, to murder those who created them. Norris’s suggestion came in response to a decision by executives at Comedy Central to censor the satirical show, “South Park,” which aired an episode that joked about showing Mohammed dressed in a bear suit.

Funny, right?

Well, not to religious Muslims, who, unable to distinguish fact from fiction or truth from allegory, view parodies of their holiest figure as an assault on Islam itself. We’ve encountered that kind of ignorant hate before, of course – most famously in the case of the so-called “Danish cartoons,” created by cartoonist Kurt Westergaard for Denmark’s news daily, the Jyllands Posten. In that case, not only was Westergaard targeted for assassination, but Danish and otherScandinavian embassies across the Middle East were torched, and violent demonstrations left numerous people dead.

But Norris didn’t even draw a cartoon of the Prophet. Rather, she sketched a number of commonplace objects – -a teacup, a spool of thread, a domino – with the caption, “Will the real likeness of the prophet Mohammed please stand up?”

Funny, right?

Apparently not – at least, not to some people, whose idea of “funny” is what happens when American civilians die. (Cut to images of Palestinians and of Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands dancing in the streets on 9/11.)

The Yemen-based cleric Anwar al-Awlaki is one Muslim unamused by Norris’s idea. Writing in the English language magazine Inspire, an online publication produced by al Qaeda, he declared: “A soul that is so debased, as to enjoy the ridicule of the messenger of Allah, the mercy to mankind; a soul that is so ungrateful toward its lord that it defames the Prophet of the religion Allah has chosen for his creation does not deserve life, does not deserve to breathe the air.”

Not funny.

Apparently, the FBI doesn’t think so, either; and here is where my outrage boiled over. Cautioning Norris to take al-Awlaki’s threat seriously, they have now advised her to change her identity, move far from her home in Seattle (where she, until now, worked for the Seattle Weekly), and start over – essentially entering into a witness protection program – only without the accompanying protection.

Let me repeat: The U.S. government is suggesting that Ms. Norris change her name, strip away her past, possibly even change her appearance, because she has been targeted by Muslim extremists who are not amused by her work or her ideas. Rather than protect her, rather than defend her, rather than stand up for her Constitutional and democratic rights, declaring their intention to route al-Awlaki out and bring him (and others who are threatening her life) to justice, the American government, as it were, is itself in essence allying with him by taking away her freedom and her life .

And here’s the kicker: it’s likely not that hard to find Al-Awlaki – who has been linked to the Fort Hood massacre, the so-called “Christmas bomber,” and the attempted bombing of Times Square. Anwar Al-Awlaki, born in Las Cruces, New-Mexico, is a citizen of the United States.

And yet, unlike the British, who for years protected and defended Salman Rushdie from the edicts of Ayatollah Khomeini and others, the USA has thrown up its hands, leaving her to her own devices, the victim of the same sick Islamic ideology that permits women to be stoned to death for the crime of having loved.

And so it becomes clear: If we are not involved in a physical war against Islam, we certainly are engaged in an ideological one. And as a woman with a secular, democratic ideal runs, now, for her life, the knights in armor assigned to save her stand aside.

This is how we protect our values? This is what has become, now, of America? That even the suggestion “Draw Mohammed” can cost a woman’s life and the Federal Bureau of Investigation will do nothing? That even the voicing of a threat has America putting down its arms?

We have spent untold billions of dollars in Afghanistan and Iraq at the cost of more than 5,000 US lives.

And all the Islamic militants had to do to conquer us was speak.

Such is the power of the word: and America now sits silenced, silent, dumb.

Islam and Sharia Law are coming to America

Sharia, or Islamic law, influences the legal code in most Muslim countries. A movement to allow sharia to set regulations that pertain to marriage, divorce, inheritance, and custody, is now expanding into the United States. All Sharia is derived from two primary sources, the divine revelations set forth in the Qur’an, and the sayings and example set by the Prophet Muhammad in the Sura.

What is Sharia Law?

Also meaning “path” in Arabic, sharia guides all aspects of Muslim life including daily routines, familial and religious obligations, and financial dealings. It is derived primarily from the Qur’an and the Sunna, the sayings, practices, and teachings of the Prophet Mohammed.

Marriage and divorce are the most significant aspects of sharia, but criminal law is the most controversial. In sharia, there are categories of offenses.

The chief elements of Sharia Law are first: a belief that women are deficient in their natural and “innate” potentials and abilities, including their psychological-makeup and intellectual capacity. The Islamic Penal Codes are based on violence in its most primitive forms. These not only authorize organized state violence, but also encourage male violence against women within the family and in society. While precise statistics are scarce, the UN estimates thousands of women are killed annually in the family honor.

While the Islamic Penal Codes have born down a tremendous injustice on the women they are not just second-class citizens, half a man, but at times their very existence is disregarded. It has been pointed out that our women have managed to achieve equality in one field only: equal right to imprisonment, exile, torture, being killed, and now being slaughtered.

Second, a belief in a social and family order where men must be guardians over women, and women must submit.

Third, a belief in an unequal system of rights and consequently, wherever the question of the reproduction of such an order is concerned, of a system of punishment that is also unequal.

1. Islam commands that drinkers and gamblers should be whipped. Sura 5:90-91.

4. Islam commands that a male and female thief must have a hand cut off. Qur’an, 5:38

5. Islam commands that highway robbers should be crucified or mutilated. Qur’an, 5:33. As an alternative, the convicted may have a hand and the opposite foot cut off while being banished from the land instead of crucifixion.

6. Islam commands that Homosexuals be executed. Abdu Dawud no. 447. Burning to death, stoned while against a wall, or stoned and thrown over a cliff.

7. Islam orders unmarried fornicators to be whipped and adulterers to be stoned to death. Qur’an, 24-6

8. Islam orders death for Muslim and possible death for non—Muslim critics of Muhammad and the Quran and even sharia itself.

9. Islam orders apostates to be killed. Sura 9:11-12

10. Islam commands offensive and aggressive and unjust jihad

Islam commands offensive and aggressive and unjust jihad. This does not allow for the freedom of religion or conscience. People of the Book (Jews and Christians) had three options (Sura 9:29): fight and die; convert and pay a forced ‘charity’ or zakat tax; or keep their Biblical faith and pay a jizya or poll tax. The last two options mean that money flows into the Islamic treasury.

ACT for America is an organization that provides education about Islam and sharia and is dedicated to stop their encroachment on America. (…)

Lead Story

If America’s homeland security policies were subject to truth-in-advertising laws, the “no-fly” list would be known around the world by its right and proper name: the “go-fly” list. As in: Go right ahead, jihadists, and fly our planes. All aboard, evil-doers.

While grandmas and grade-schoolers and war heroes patiently pass through a gauntlet of wands, checkpoints and screening obstacles, the nation’s safety watchdogs are asleep at the wheel. They’ve mentally checked out at the check-in counter. And they’re in over their heads at federal counterterrorism centers, where “watch list” means putting the names of dangerous operatives into massive databases — then idly watching potential bombers waltz through our airports and onto our tarmacs.

The federal no-fly scheme was bypassed or breached easily by both the Christmas Day bomb plotter and the Times Square bomb plotter. In the former case, Nigerian terror operative Umar Abdulmutallab had been on the counterterrorism radar screen for his radical jihadi threats (which had been reported by his father to U.S. embassy officials in London). But the young, single, rootless Muslim extremist with suspicious travel patterns — ding, ding, ding, ding, ding! — did not meet the standards for watch-listing and didn’t even make it onto the second-tier “selectee list” of potential threats who can fly only after additional screening.

By contrast, beleaguered 8-year-old Mikey Hicks of Clifton, N.J., still can’t get off the selectee list after years of ridiculous harassment while traveling on family vacations.

In the Times Square case, Team Obama immediately pointed fingers at the airline industry — and Emirates airlines, in particular — for failing to check no-fly list updates. The hindsight cops at the White House are now touting ex post facto rules mandating that the airlines check no-fly alerts every two hours instead of every 24 hours.

But law enforcement officials themselves neglected to contact all airlines directly and red-flag the addition of would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad’s name to the government no-fly list. Moreover, despite paying cash for his trip to the Middle East and being listed on the Department of Homeland Security travel lookout list since 1999, Shahzad received no extra screening from the Transportation Security Administration (confirming once again the bureaucracy’s own inside joke that TSA stands for “Thousands Standing Around”).

The tourism industry certainly shares blame for putting travel profits ahead of national security over the years. But in this case, it was only thanks to airline industry compliance with a post-9/11 procedure requiring plane officials to send passenger manifests to the Department of Homeland Security that the feds caught up with Shahzad (whom they had lost track of in Connecticut) before he jetted off to Dubai.

President Obama has had plenty of time to address the enforcement lapses, database loopholes and technological delays of his predecessor. After the Christmas Day bombing debacle, he pledged to be proactive: “We will not rest.” But to this day, TSA still doesn’t check all domestic and international airline passenger manifests against the no-fly/go-fly list.

The data are only as good as the people entrusted to collect, process and use the information to protect national security. And without the ability to share and access the information across numerous agencies, the data are useless. Nearly nine years after Sept. 11, there is still no functional interoperability among an alphabet soup of national security and criminal databases — including NAILS, TECS, CLASS, VISAS VIPER, TUSCAN, TIPPIX, IBIS, CIS, APIS, SAVE, IDENT, DACS, AFIS, ENFORCE and the NCIC. The Senate raised questions about understaffed efforts to modernize some of these databases back in March. What are we waiting for? The next jihadi bombing attempt?

The warped priorities of the Obama White House imperil us all. A command-and-control government that squanders its time and our money taking over businesses it has no business running — health insurance, auto manufacturing, banking, student loans — is a government neglecting its most fundamental mandate: providing for the common defense.

“This is war of religion, not just a war between Arabs and Israelis…this is an Islamic war, which will end in victory only under the banner of Jihad”

Here is yet more indication that the war against Israel is a jihad against Israel, motivated by an antisemitism with deep, ancient roots in Islam — and thus it will not be solved by Israeli concessions, or the establishment of a Palestinian state. The one thing we can be sure of about this is that Western analysts will ignore it, as they have all the other indications of the same thing. “Calls for Jihad in a Rally of Kuwaiti Students Union: This Is a War of Religion, Not a War between Israelis and Arabs,” from MEMRITV, March 29 (thanks to all who sent this in):

The following excerpts are from a rally in which Kuwaiti students show solidarity with the Palestinian cause. The rally aired on Al-Jazeera TV on March 29, 2010.

The number of mosques and mosque attendants are witnessing a tremendous increase in recent years in America. About two million Muslims are associated with the mosques as the number of attendants increases to more than 75% during the last five years. There were only 500,000 Muslims going to a mosque in 1994. This was revealed by a comprehensive study of the mosques throughout the country. The study points out that estimates of a total Muslim population of 6-7 million in America seems reasonable in view of the figure of two million Muslims associated with the mosques. An average of 1,629 Muslims associate in some way with the religious life of each mosque, such as attending mosque for Friday and Eid prayers.

They’re here folks. Lots of them and they are waiting for the call from there Imam to start the bombing here….again!

For 15 years, from the mid 1970s to 1990, I worked in Detroit, Michigan. I watched it descend into the abyss of crime, debauchery, gun play, drugs, school truancy, car-jacking, gangs and human depravity. I watched entire city blocks burned out. I watched graffiti explode on buildings, cars, trucks, buses and school yards. Trash everywhere! Detroiters walked through it, tossed more into it and ignored it.

Tens of thousands and then, hundreds of thousands today exist on federal welfare, free housing and food stamps! With Aid to Dependent Children, minority women birthed eight to 10 and in once case, one woman birthed 24 kids as reported by the Detroit Free Press—all on American taxpayer dollarss. A new child meant a new car payment, new TV and whatever mom wanted. I saw Lyndon Baines Johnson’s “Great Society” flourish in Detroit. If you give money for doing nothing, you will get more hands out taking money for doing nothing.

Mayor Coleman Young, perhaps the most corrupt mayor in America, outside of Richard Daley in Chicago, rode Detroit down to its knees. He set the benchmark for cronyism, incompetence and arrogance. As a black man, he said, “I am the MFIC.” The IC meant ‘in charge’. You can figure out the rest. Detroit became a majority black city with 67 percent African-Americans.

As a United Van Lines truck driver for my summer job from teaching math and science, I loaded hundreds of American families into my van for a new life in another city or state. Detroit plummeted from 1.8 million citizens to 912,000 today. At the same time, legal and illegal immigrants converged on the city, so much so, that Muslims number over 300,000. Mexicans number 400,000 throughout Michigan, but most work in Detroit.

As the Muslims moved in, the whites moved out. As the crimes became more violent, the whites fled. Finally, unlawful Mexicans moved in at a torrid pace. You could cut the racial tension in the air with a knife! Detroit may be one our best examples of multiculturalism: pure dislike and total separation from America.

Today, you hear Muslim calls to worship over the city like a new American Baghdad with hundreds of Islamic mosques in Michigan, paid for by Saudi Arabia oil money. High school flunk out rates reached 76 percent last June according to NBC’s Brian Williams. Classrooms resemble more foreign countries than America. English? Few speak it! The city features a 50 percent illiteracy rate and growing. Unemployment hit 28.9 percent in 2009 as the auto industry vacated the city.

In this week’s Time Magazine October 4, 2009, “The Tragedy of Detroit: How a great city fell and how it can rise again,” I choked on the writer’s description of what happened.

“If Detroit had been savaged by a hurricane and submerged by a ravenous flood, we’d know a lot more about it,” said Daniel Okrent. “If drought and carelessness had spread brush fires across the city, we’d see it on the evening news every night. Earthquake, tornadoes, you name it — if natural disaster had devastated the city that was once the living proof of American prosperity, the rest of the country might take notice. Top of Form

Bottom of Form

But Detroit, once our fourth largest city, now 11th and slipping rapidly, has had no such luck. Its disaster has long been a slow unwinding that seemed to remove it from the rest of the country. Even the death rattle that in the past year emanated from its signature industry brought more attention to the auto executives than to the people of the city, who had for so long been victimized by their dreadful decision-making.”

As Coleman Young’s corruption brought the city to its knees, no amount of federal dollars could save the incredible payoffs, kick backs and illegality permeating his administration. I witnessed the city’s death from the seat of my 18-wheeler tractor trailer because I moved people out of every sector of decaying Detroit.

“By any quantifiable standard, the city is on life support. Detroit’s treasury is $300 million short of the funds needed to provide the barest municipal services,” Okrent said. “The school system, which six years ago was compelled by the teachers’ union to reject a philanthropist’s offer of $200 million to build 15 small, independent charter high schools, is in receivership. The murder rate is soaring, and 7 out of 10 remain unsolved. Three years after Katrina devastated New Orleans, unemployment in that city hit a peak of 11%. In Detroit, the unemployment rate is 28.9%. That’s worth spelling out: twenty-eight point nine percent.”

At the end of Okrent’s report, and he will write a dozen more about Detroit, he said, “That’s because the story of Detroit is not simply one of a great city’s collapse. It’s also about the erosion of the industries that helped build the country we know today. The ultimate fate of Detroit will reveal much about the character of America in the 21st century. If what was once the most prosperous manufacturing city in the nation has been brought to its knees, what does that say about our recent past? And if it can’t find a way to get up, what does that say about our future?”

As you read in my book review of Chris Steiner’s book, $20 Per Gallon, the auto industry won’t come back. Immigration will keep pouring more and more uneducated third world immigrants from the Middle East into Detroit—thus creating a beachhead for Islamic hegemony in America. If 50 percent illiteracy continues, we will see more homegrown terrorists spawned out of the Muslim ghettos of Detroit. Illiteracy plus Islam equals walking human bombs. You have already seen it in the Madrid, Spain, London, England and Paris, France with train bombings, subway bombings and riots. As their numbers grow, so will their power to enact their barbaric Sharia Law that negates republican forms of government, first amendment rights and subjugates women to the lowest rungs on the human ladder. We will see more honor killings by upset husbands, fathers and brothers that demand subjugation by their daughters, sisters and wives. Muslims prefer beheadings of women to scare the hell out of any other members of their sect from straying.

Multiculturalism: what a perfect method to kill our language, culture, country and way of life.